Last weekend I was in McKinney, TX as the special guest at a party being thrown by a friend of mine, Don Clark. He and his wife, Paulette, had just finished a three-year build on their Tuscan-themed retirement home, and they were having some of their car friends over to celebrate.

I have known Don for a number of years and actually first met him when we were producing the TNN series, Popular Hot Rodding Television. The second season of that show was shot in a studio in Dallas and Don supplied us with a car to have on the set for one of the episodes.

I learned that this car was just one of several really amazing cars in his collection, and this led to me shooting with him for an episode of My Classic Car in 2002. It was hard to decide what to focus on, but I ended up going with his COPO Camaro and his ’69 Yenko Camaro. Really, how can you go wrong with that pair?

Don is a real car guy and at that time he was hosting an annual party at his place just for friends and fellow car enthusiasts. People could tour his collection and since they all brought their own toys, there was also quite a car show going on outside too.

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This past week I was in Washington for SEMA’s biannual DC Rally.

SEMA (Specialty Equipment Market Association) is the trade association that represents the automotive aftermarket. It is made up of 7,500 member companies; most of which are small businesses. In fact, the annual SEMA show in Las Vegas is the largest gathering of small businesses in the US. And while the individual companies may be small, the automotive aftermarket in total accounts for $32 billion in sales annually.

I’ve been on the Board of Directors of SEMA for the past seven years and will finally be terming out in July. There was a board meeting in DC in conjunction with the Rally, but the main purpose for being there was to keep this industry and this hobby top-of-mind on Capitol Hill.

I had meetings with the two senators from Indiana, Richard Lugar and Evan Bayh, as well as the congressman from my district, Brad Ellsworth, to discuss issues that affect our industry like health care costs for small businesses and tax credits on capital expenditures and R&D.

This may seem like sort of boring stuff, but there is a direct correlation between the strength of the car hobby and the health of the aftermarket. The hobby is as strong as it is today at least in part because of growth of the automotive aftermarket. Twenty years ago we couldn’t do the restorations, the rods and the mods we can these days because the parts simply weren’t available. However, the demand was there, and leave it to American entrepreneurs to create products (and entire businesses) to meet that demand. Actually they fuel each other; the hobby is strong because the aftermarket is strong and vice versa.

SEMA has a Washington office that is dedicated to keeping legislation “hobby friendly”. Many of you (or perhaps your car clubs) are members of the SEMA Action Network (SAN); a grassroots network that stays on top of local issues and that can be rapidly mobilized when we need to make our collective voice heard in Washington.

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